Fixing cars in Siberia

Last week, during a drive from Chicago to Oklahoma with my siblings, I learned a lesson that may prove valuable should any of you find yourselves needing to travel across this great land of ours—in particular, across its more, um, distant and depopulated reaches: America at its highway-sprawl, tire-shop-and-Waffle-House, cows-and-barbed-wire worst improves considerably when viewed while you’re reading Ian Frazier’s Travels in Siberia.

It's a wonderful book, full of passages that made me laugh out loud, to the amusement of rocketlass. If you harbor the sort of irrational, exuberant love of Frazier’s writing that I do, you should go get this book immediately, before spring leads you to thoughts of warmer climes. (And if you don't already know Frazier's longer work, hie thee to your local bookstore and grab his Great Plains today. It, too, makes great company for long drives, while also being suitable for reading aloud to friends as you try to suppress your laughter.)

Keeping with today's automotive theme, I’ll share two of the many scenes in the book that involve car trouble and Siberia’s ever-present heaps of trash. First, a muffler problem that Frazier’s driver, Sergei, solves simply by knowing what resources are likely to be at hand:

A boulder in the path knocked away a foot or so of tailpipe. A worse bump on an uphill grade crushed and scraped away the remaining two or three feet, leaving no pipe extending from the muffler’s outlet to carry off the exhaust fumes. Immediately the air in the van, which had never been good, became unbearable. Now I could detect an actual blue fog. I tried to remember what the signs of carbon monoxide poisoning were. Sergei, as expected, refused to go to a muffler shop or do anything about the problem. That was not necessary, Sergei announced, sitting beside an open window and its plentiful incoming dust. Finally Volodya, the swing vote among us, switched to my side and told Sergei that we had to fix the tailpipe right away or we’d all suffocate. Sergei said he would fix it, and with some annoyance he pulled over to the shoulder.

He got out. Volodya and I watched. Sergei was just wandering around a weedy patch of ground that paralleled the road, looking down and kicking occasionally at the dirt. After a minute or two he bent over and stood up with something in his hand. It looked to be a piece of pipe. We got out to see what he’d found, and he showed us a somewhat rusty but still serviceable yard-long piece of tailpipe that must’ve fallen off another vehicle. It was exactly the same length as the one we’d lost.

A bit of wire, a few minutes under the chassis, and presto! Van fixed!

Sergei’s technique, in its silence and obscurity, calls to mind Sherlock Holmes—but Frazier is no Watson, perpetually surprised. When the van dies later, he watches Sergei’s repair effort with every expectation of success:

The driver seemed overwhelmed, but Sergei had taken a piece out of the engine and was strolling on the ice, hunting around. . . . After more tinkering by Sergei, the driver turned the key and the car started and ran at a rough idle. . . . Later I asked Sergei to describe how he had done it, and he said, “When the Uazik [the van] died at approximately four o’clock in the afternoon in the middle of the great Lena River in traffic, the driver opened the hood and found with horror that in a most important part of the engine—the carburetor—a piece was missing. A screw had come off and the small rod that held the float regulating the gasoline level of the carburetor had fallen out and disappeared. Thus, the gasoline stream flew into the carburetor as if from a hose, gasoline was spilling on the ice, and naturally the car would not run.

“What was to be done? I looked all over on the ice road in the hope of finding our missing part. Instead of our part I picked up about half a bucket of other parts, but not the one we needed. I then disassembled the carburetor and it appeared that all we needed was to find a piece of wire or a nail of the right diameter in order temporarily to replace that rod on which the float of the carburetor was set. I did find such a wire nearby on the ice, I cut off a piece of this wire, and I inserted it where the missing part should be. I found a bolt of approximately the right size belonging to some other machine under our car’s wheels, and with this bolt’s help I fixed the rod in place. In truth, the carburetor did not work so well as before, but nevertheless we were able to drive from the ice road and reach our hotel. Thus I was once again convinced that the Russian car is the most reliable in the world, because it is possible under necessity to replace any part in it with a piece of wire or with a nail.”

Even the joyous extravagance of Sergei's explanation of his work is reminiscent of Holmes—which brings me to close by offering him some of Dr. Watson’s praise for Holmes: “You have an extraordinary genius for minutiae.”

Against interpretation, against allegory, for Kafka

The problem with having a Tumbler annex to this blog is that occasionally when I'm wandering my bookshelves in search of some brief, interesting material to post, I get sucked into reading something I hadn't at all meant to spend my evening with.

That was the case last night, as, flipping through one of the Library of America's collections of Edmund Wilson's criticism, I started reading a piece from 1947, "A Dissenting Opinion on Kafka." It's ostensibly a review of a couple of volumes of Kafka odds and ends and criticism, A Franz Kafka Miscellany and The Kafka Problem; the latter in particular seems to have provoked Wilson. Its forty-one essays and memoirs of Kafka, Wilson writes, "finally give rise to the suspicion that Kafka is being wildly overdone." He continues:

One realizes that it is not merely a question of appreciating Kafka as a poet who gives expression for the intellectuals to their emotions of helplessness and self-contempt but of building him up as a theologian and saint who can somehow also justify for them--or help them to accept without justification--the ways of a banal, bureaucratic and incomprehensible God to sensitive and anxious men.

Leaving aside the swipe at the sensitivity of the critics, smacking as it does of some of the references to masculine toughness that occasionally mar Orwell's criticism, Wilson in that sentence reveals that his argument is more with the critics than with Kafka's work itself: other critics--"cultists," Wilson calls them elsewhere--have made of Kafka a minor deity and the The Trial and The Castle "something like sacred writings, finding in them religious implications that Wilson thinks are in reality "practically nil."

All of which is fair enough. Writers need to be rescued from their fans on occasion. But in condemning the too-grand claims made for Kafka, Wilson goes too far himself--"Kafka is impossible to take . . . as a major writer"--ending up trapped in the ways of thinking that he's deriding: he goes looking for explicit meaning in Kafka, and, not finding it--or not finding it in the way he's expecting--ends by dismissing the work:

If, however, one puts Kafka beside writers with whom he may properly be compared, he still seems rather unsatisfactory. Gogol and Poe were equally neurotic, in their destinies they were equally unhappy; and if it is true, as Mr. Savage says [in one of the essays in The Kafka Problem, that there is present in Kafka's world neither personality nor love, there is no love in either Gogol or Poe, and though there are plenty of personalities in Gogol, the actors of Poe, as a rule, are even less characterized than Kafka's. But, though the symbols that these writers generate are just as unpleasant as Kafka's, though, like his, they represent mostly the intense and painful realization of emotional culs-de-sac, yet they have both certain advantages over Kafka--for Gogol was nourished and fortified by his heroic conception or Russia, and Poe, for all his Tory view, is post-Revolutionary American in his challenging, defiant temper, his alert and curious mind. In their ways, they are both tonic. But the denationalized, discouraged, disaffected, disabled Kafka, though for the moment he may frighten or amuse us, can in the end only let us down. he is quite true to his time and place, but it is surely a time and place in which few of us will want to linger--whether as stunned and hypnotized helots of totalitarian states or as citizens of freer societies, who have relapsed into taking Kafka's stories as evidence that God's law and man's purpose are conceived in terms so different that we may as well give up hope of ever identifying the one with the other.

I enjoy Poe, but any analysis that leads to you plumping for him over Kafka is inherently flawed. The problem is that very one of interpretation: Kafka, at his best, is meant to be experienced rather than analyzed. As the Bible would have it, "The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life." A freshman lit class can ever-so-painfully drag theme after theme from a reading of The Trial, and in some sense it's obviously far from inappropriate to do so: part of what keeps that novel alive for people is the ways they can use it to illuminate the contemporary world. But we are not students. We don't have papers due, and reading the book that way, with readers' guide–style questions in mind, strips it of much of its power as a strange work of personal expression, a fever dream that has no applicability to ordinary life, no explanation, because it has left the ordinary world far behind, a dim memory. The very raggedness that Wilson marks in the debit column is a feature when the book--and, even more, its neighbors The Castle and Amerika--is read this way: this novel is unfinished because finishing it is impossible, would close off too many possibilities, would trade a pretense of perfection for the inherent raggedness of individual experience. Theseus's bad example aside, we don't usually escape from labyrinths in this life.

That resistance to interpretation is even more true of the shorter fiction, which is what really draws me back to Kafka again and again.Wilson acknowledges that

Some of his short stories are absolutely first-rate, comparable to Gogol's and Poe's. Like them, they are realistic nightmares that embody in concrete imagery the manias of neurotic states.

And those stories are, again, at their best when taken as strange wholes, comprehensible only on their own terms of reference. Here, perfection does have its place: as a marker of the independent, singular existence of each of these tales.

Take "Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor," for instance, with the anxiety of its two jumping balls and the sulky, complicated assistants: read in a rush, it draws you inexorably into the claustrophobia of Blumfeld's world; interpreted, its power seeps out into banality (as is the case with its cousin "Bartleby the Scrivener"). Or the extreme case represented by the brevity of "Give it Up!":

It was very early in the morning, the streets clean and deserted, I was on my way to the station. As I compared the tower clock with my watch I realized it was much later than I had thought and that I had to hurry; the shock of this discovery made me feel uncertain of the way, I wasn't very well acquainted with the town as yet; fortunately, there was a policeman at hand, I ran to him and breathlessly asked him the way. He smiled and said: "You asking me the way?" "Yes," I said, "since I can't find it myself." "Give it up! Give it up!" said he, and turned with a sudden jerk, like someone who wants to be alone with his laughter.

Sure, you could make the policeman the representative of the indifferent modern bureaucratic state, and--but good god, aren't you falling asleep already? And how do you account for the awkwardness of that "sudden jerk," and the impression of solitary laughter? The same goes for "Before the Law," "The Imperial Message," "Fellowship," or any of a dozen other of Kafka's shortest writings. Like dreams, they wither under analysis; like dreams, they offer us hermetic brilliance if we choose to accept them on their own terms.

I realize that such an approach risks abdicating the role of the critic entirely, and I want to be clear that I'm not advocating this position for the vast majority of writers. Kafka, "major" or not, is for me a special case, leading a class of his own whose other members include, on the lighter side, Calvino and the best of Murakami, and on the darker side, say, the Bible and the most inscrutable Greek myths. Halldor Laxness reaches this pitch at times; Steven Millhauser can, too, on occasion, if a bit self-consciously. And surely there are others? (Zachary Mason, I've got my eye on you!)

I realize, too, that this post is far from an adequate or considered rebuttal of Wilson. I'm taking advantage of the mutability of a blog and responding to Kafka as a reader and a writer rather than a critic, spinning out one evening's thoughts rather than marshaling an argument. Wilson was presenting a viewpoint, a position, an entry in an ongoing conversation about a writer whose reputation was still being developed. I'm giving disjointed impressions spiked with passion. But hybridity and awkwardness seem right for Kafka, leading me to close with this, from "Description of a Struggle":

So we walked on in silence. Listening to the sound of our steps, I couldn't understand why I was incapable of keeping step with my acquaintance--especially since the air was clear and I could see his legs quite plainly. Here and there someone leaned out of a window and watched us.

And, the scene, framed by that window, of two men walking together, awkwardly out of step, conveys no clear meaning; yet the watchers, silent, never forget it.

Lorenzo Da Ponte in New York

In a comment to the last in my recent string of posts about Casanova, noxrpm asked how Casanova's friend Lorenzo da Ponte, Mozart's librettist, came to move to New York, where he finished out life as the first professor of Italian literature at Columbia University. Turning to Da Ponte's Memoirs, I learn that it was all about money. Or lack thereof: having failed to heed Casanova's advice to stay away from London, Da Ponte found himself there, owing everyone in sight. A lunch with a number of men who owed him money was inconclusive (perhaps because together they put away twelve bottles of wine?), and the next night Da Ponte was awakened by a knock:

I knew it was a constable of the court; but since he was the only one among so many whom I believed to be honest, sincere, and capable of charity and friendship, I went at once to open to him. It was then that he told me, with tears in his eyes, that by ten o'clock on the following morning he would have eleven writs against me; that my creditors (twelve in all) had promised him a fine gratuity if he had me in his house of detention before noon; but that the cruelty of those treacherous wretches had so moved his heart, that he had come to warn me and advise me to leave London.

I thanked him as he deserved, and offered him several guineas, which he refused disdainfully, even insisting that I accept a few of him! I need not describe the confused emotions that assailed me at that moment. He embraced me, and went away. It was not yet midnight. I dressed hurriedly and ran to see Gould, who was then managing the Opera.

After some hurried discussion--and a 100-guinea loan--Da Ponte went looking for a ship and within days was off to America to join his wife and children, who had been living there for some months with some of her family. They settled in New York, where he continued to be reliably insolvent until chance brought a meeting in a bookstore with Clement C. Moore, future author of "'Twas the Night Before Christmas" and then-current trustee of Columbia:

I approached [the] counter and asked [the owner] if he had any Italian books in his store.

"I have a few," he replied, "but no one ever asks for them."

While we stood chatting, an American gentleman approached and joined in our conversation. I was soon aware from his remarks that he was admirably red in a variety of literature. Coming by chance to allude to the language and literature of my country, I took occasion to ask him why they should be so little studied in a country as enlightened as I believed America to be.

"Oh, sir," he replied, "modern Italy is not, unfortunately, the Italy of ancient times. She is not that sovereign queen which gave to the ages and to the world emulators, nay rivals, of the supreme Greeks."

He was then pleased to inform me that "five or at the most six" were the writers of fame, of whom the country of those great men could boast over the past six centuries. I asked him, not without a sarcastic smile, to name those authors; and he: "Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Ariosto, Tasso, . . . " And he stopped: "To tell the truth, I cannot recall the sixth."

Despite that inauspicious beginning, a friendship was struck, and from there the American infatuation with Old World high culture took over. As Arthur Livingston writes in his introduction to the NYRB Classics edition of Da Ponte's Memoirs, the Da Pontes "were the find of the social season of 1807," and, as society rallied 'round this perpetually broke novelty, Moore soon wrangled him the position at Columbia.

Unlike his friend, Casanova seems never to have seriously considered shifting his perpetually mobile life to America. According to Ian Kelly, in his biography of Casanova, we can blame the pox:

Oddly he eschewed a trip to America for exactly this reason the disease was widely and correctly assumed to have originated there, and it was thought it attacked the body more efficiently west of the Azores.

Alas! Imagine the havoc Casanova could have wreaked in the high society of Colonial America! Casanova taking up arms against the British! Cuckolding the Founding Fathers! Oh, history, how you've let us down!

William Dean Howells and the pleasures of the minor writer

The brief mention of minor writers at the end of Wednesday's post reminded me that I've neglected to write about a book I read recently and loved, William Dean Howells's Indian Summer (1886). As I read it, marveling at its wit and insight, I kept asking myself, Why have I never read Howells before?

The answer is actually pretty simple: I thought of him as minor, a friend-and-editor sort who also also happened to write--sort of an American Edmund Gosse. Wendy Lesser gets it right in her introduction to the NYRB Classics edition of Indian Summer: after quoting a letter from Twain in which he praises Howells for "making the feelings clear without analyzing the guts out of them" like George Eliot and Hawthorne (and, by implication, Henry James), Lesser writes,

It is exactly this sort of praise, taken too literally in most cases, which has damned William Dean Howells to his present obscurity. He is not Henry James, not George Eliot, he lacks their moral earnestness, their artistic intensity, therefore (this argument runs) we don't have to read him. But why? . . . Refusing to read Howells because he is not James or Eliot makes about as much sense as refusing to listen to Rossini because he is not Wagner. For some of us (and not only Mark Twain) the comic mode is not just a poor runner-up; it offers certain rewards that are unavailable in the tragic.

And Indian Summer is comic, even as it tells as very Jamesian story of misplaced love and failures of self-knowledge. Howells's dialogue is superb: he successfully creates a character who fancies himself, and is received by others as, a wit, a master of light-hearted banter--and whose dialogue is genuinely bubbly and funny. I quoted several examples on my Tumbler as I read the novel; they'll give you a good taste of the tone and verve of Howells's writing.

Then there's the additional, unexpected pleasure of Howells's allusiveness. The shadow of James is as inescapable in the novel as it surely was in the literary scene of the day; the book's setting and plot, which find American expatriates socializing in Italy, is as Jamesian as you can get. But Howells doesn't stop there: he deliberately plants a little joke keyed to his own minor status:

"This is deliciously mysterious. . . . Mr. Colville concealing an inward trepidation under a bold front; Miss Graham agitated but firm; the child as much puzzled as the old woman. I feel we are a very interesting group--almost dramatic."

"Oh, call us a passage from a modern novel," suggested Colville, "if you're in the romantic mood. One of Mr. James's."

"Don't you think we ought to be rather more of the great world for that? I hardly feel up to Mr. James. I should have said Howells. Only nothing happens in that case!"

"Oh, very well; that's the most comfortable way. If it's only Howells, then there's no reason why I shouldn't go with Miss Graham to show her the view of Florence from that cypress grove up yonder."

Does the metafictional ever get more gently self-tweaking than that? And all while keeping the characters firmly in character!

Indian Summer is a real pleasure, and it's unquestionably going to send me off after A Hazard of New Fortunes and The Rise of Silas Lapham. If winter is proving too much, might I suggest a brief jaunt to Florence in the company of Howells?

The minor T. E. Lawrence

I want to stay with Michael Korda's T. E. Lawrence biography another day; but this post, you'll be glad to know, is focused not on key moments in the book but rather on particularly silly bits--which, as longtime readers will know, are a key marker of a good biography.

Such as this unforgettable description of military scholar and biographer B. H. Liddell Hart:

In every way the opposite of Lawrence, Liddell Hart was tall, elegant, storklike, fond of the good things in life, and so fascinated by women that he oversaw the smallest details of the lingerie for both his [presumably consecutive] wives, was exacting and deeply involved in the designs of their corsets, and regularly measured the waists of his two daughters. He was in fact a walking encyclopedia on the subject of lingerie--or as one of his biographers, Alex Danchev, refers to it wittily, "l'artillerie de la nuit"--as knowledgeable about bras and merry widows and garter belts as he was about war. A perfectionist in all things, he was obsessed by the ideal of the feminine wasp waist, which was the Schwerpunkt (to borrow a phrase from German strategic thinking) of his sexual desire.

Extending one's mania for perfection to one's spouse's waistline seems to be a step, or maybe several steps, too far. Which might explain the multiple wives . . .

I wish I could find online the photo that Korda uses of Liddel Hart and Lawrence, which illustrates perfectly the physical difference between the two men: Lawrence is standing on a bollard on a quay to bring him up to Liddell Hart's height, while Hart looks like a particularly well-dressed skeleton with a nicely groomed mustache. The photo of Liddell Hart below will at least give you an idea.

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Then there's this bit, less amusing but nonetheless, I think, interesting--and featured here primarily for Ed Park, fan of the minor:

After the [translation of] Odyssey, Lawrence put in good order a compilation of poems he had liked over the years: Minorities, consisting, with his typical taste for paradox, of minor works by major poets, or major work by minor poets.

Frustratingly, however, Korda notes that not all the poets and poems included could genuinely be classified as minor--rather, he suggests, the anthology gathered poems that meant a lot to Lawrence, most of which were relatively minor. Which shouldn't surprise us: nothing Lawrence did, after all, was ever quite straightforward.

T. E. Lawrence

Michael Korda's huge new biography of T. E. Lawrence, Hero, is exactly what I wanted in a Lawrence bio: it's thorough, serious, fair-minded, and full of fascinating (and sometimes pleasantly ridiculous) detail. The Lawrence who emerges from Korda's pages is perhaps no more instantly apprehensible than the figure we've been trying to understand all these years, but his many, often contradictory, facets and desires make sense--they seem, perhaps for the first time, to really belong to a single figure. This is not a Lawrence seen through one lens or forced into one box; this is the man in the round, as strange and frequently admirable as ever.

Two sections in particular seem worth sharing as illustrations of the lengths to which Lawrence would go to hold up his idiosyncratic ideal of strength and honor. First, an incident from during the Arab Revolt that appears in Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom, here retold by Korda:

In the last light of day, Lawrence rode alone close to the railway line and surprised a solitary Turkish soldier, who had left his rifle a few yards away while he took a nap. Lawrence had the soldier, "a young man, stout, but sulky looking," covered with his pistol, but after a moment he merely said, "God is merciful," and rode off, faintly interested to see whether the Turk would grab the rifle and shoot him. This is Lawrence at his best--not just the moment of mercy toward an enemy, but the moral courage (and perverted curiosity) to test whether the "Turk was man enough not to shoot me in the back." Not too Lawrence's distinction--the right thing for the Turkish soldier to do would have been to shoot Lawrence, but the manly thing for him to do was to spare Lawrence, as he himself had been spared. How many British officers would have felt that way? How many would have put their lives at risk to see what the outcome would be? It is one of the most interesting and consistent parts of Lawrence's character that he continually set himself these moral tests, in which he risked everything to see whether he could live up to his own ideals.

Korda's right: that one moment could almost be used as a key to Lawrence's entire personality, exemplifying his perverse devotion to what he understood to be right and his willingness to sacrifice everything of himself in its pursuit.

But if that moment is, if odd, at least impressive and admirable, this next one edges well over into masochism for its own sake:

In the spring of 1926, coming to the aid of a man whose car had been involved in an accident, he offered to start the engine and the man neglected to retard the ignition. The starting handle flew back sharply, breaking Lawrence's right arm and dislocating his wrist. Showing no sign of pain or shock, he calmly asked the driver to adjust the ignition, cranked the engine again with his left hand, then drove his motorcycle back to Cranwell. In Flight Sergeant Pugh's words, "with his right arm dangling and shifting gears with his foot, he got his bus home, and parked without a word to a soul of the pain he was suffering." The medical officer was away, and it was the next dy before he could see Lawrence, who still did not complain. "That is a man!" Pugh commented admiringly.

Agreed, but I'd also add "crazy" in there somewhere. Would a quick, "Say, chap, I don't mean to whinge, but you seem to have broken my arm," have dealt such a grievous blow to the cause of honor?

One a day keeps the plague away

The depths of winter always feel like a good time for a project, so I've launched into one: from a beginning as the snow started falling on February 1, and continuing for ninety-nine more days, I'll be reading a story from the Decameron every day.

The Decameron seems like a book I ought to have read long ago-it's right up my alley, a gaggle of stories that is sort of cross between Chaucer and the Thousand and One Nights, with a few more Black Death-inspired digs at organized religion. Yet somehow I'd never opened it, so two days ago I plucked a copy from my shelf--an old Modern Library edition, translated somewhat archaically by John Payne (and dedicated "To my friend Stephane Mallarme")--and dove in.

After a framing account of the descent of the plague on Italy, as gruesome, detailed, and hopeless in its outlook as Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year, ten young survivors hole up in an abandoned country house to ride out the infestation. If the Decameron were being written now, they'd get drunk, have some sex, and by picked off one by one by a creatively sadistic madman. Fortunately, Boccaccio decides to have them tell stories instead, one a day from each person for ten days.

The first story is a simple account of a reprobate scrivener on his deathbed pulling the wool over the eyes of a priest, but the joy Boccaccio takes in enumerating the man's catalog of faults overwhelms any intended moral or point, pro- or anti-religion:

False witness bore he with especial delight, required or not required, and the greatest regard being in those times paid to oaths in France, as he recked nothing of forswearing himself, he knavishly gained all the suits concerning which he was called upon to tell the truth upon his faith. He took inordinate pleasure and was mighty diligent in stirring up troubles and enmities and scandals betwen friends and kinsfolk and whomsoever else, and the greater the mischiefs he saw ensue thereof, the more he rejoiced. If bidden to manslaughter or whatsoever other naughty deed, he went about it with a will, without ever saying nay thereto; and many a time of his proper choice he had been known to wound men and do them to death with his own hand. he was a terrible blasphemer of God and the saints, and that for every trifle, being the most choleric man alive. To church he went never and all the sacraments thereof he flouted in abominable terms, as things of no account; whilst, on the other hand, he was still fain to haunt and use taverns and other lewd places. Of women he was as fond as dogs of the stick; but in the contrary he delighted more than any filthy fellow alive. He robbed and pillaged with as much conscience as a godly man would make oblation to God; he was a very glutton and a great wine bibber, insomuch that bytimes it wrought him shameful mischief, and to boot, he was a notorious gamer and caster of cogged dice. But why should I enlarge in so many words? He was belike the worst man that ever was born.

A translator's note calls this, "A 'two-pence coloured' sketch of an impossible villain, drawn with a crudeness unusual in Boccaccio," which suggests to me that Payne may be a bit too serious for my taste. What makes the story a treat is that Boccaccio holds his scrivener to this character: when he discovers he's dying, he opts for nothing but baldfaced lies at his final confession, for, as he says, "I have in my lifetime done God the Lord so many an affront that it will make neither more nor less, and I do Him yet another at the point of death."

Pay attention, Darth Vader: there's a villain you can count on.

"It takes an effort of the imagination to conjure up a rose," or, In the bleak midwinter

{Photos by rocketlass.}

Pleasantly housebound by the third-largest snowfall in Chicago history, I turn for today's post to some old favorites, all reliably sound on the subject of snow.

First, there's E. B. White, whose thoughts on snow have already graced my Tumblr and Twitter feeds today. A pleasantly rambling New Yorker essay from 1971, "The Winter of the Great Snows," offers plenty of thoughts on the stuff, so much a part of White's Maine winters. "When snow accumulates," writes White,

week after week, month after month, it works curious miracles. Familiar objects simply disappear, like my pig house and the welltop near the barn door, and one tends to forget that they are there. Our cedar hedge (about five feet high) disappeared months ago, along with the pink snow fences that are set to hold the drifts. My two small guard dogs, Jones and Susy, enjoy the change in elevation and the excitement of patrol duty along the crusted top of the hedge, where they had never been before. They have lookout posts made of snow that the plow has thrown high in the air, giving them a chance to take the long view of things.

A chance, at least when considered metaphorically, that I doubt they took--unless perhaps the secret of dogs' good natured satisfaction is a quiet far-sightedness? No, scratch that thought: the dog I saw romping in front of our building moments ago was unquestionably living only in, for, and of the present moment.



White comments on a phenomenon that rocketlass and I got to see firsthand this afternoon when we finally ventured out: the plight of those in the path of the plow. Writes White:

Every new swipe of the plow hurls a gift of snow into the mouth of a driveway, so that, in effect, the plowmen, often working while we sleep snug in our beds, create a magnificent, smooth, broad highway to which no one can gain access with his automobile until he has passed a private miracle of snow removal. It is tantalizing to see a fine stretch of well-plowed public road just the other side of a six-foot barricade of private snow. My scheme for town plowing would be to have each big plow attended by a small plow, as a big fish is sometimes attended by a small fish. There would be a pause at each driveway while the little plow removes the snow that the big plow has deposited. But I am just a dreamer.

The grade-school philosopher in me sees a risk of infinite regression, of ever-smaller plows followed by ever-smaller plows ad infinitum, but I suppose that, come February, a driveway owner in rural Maine would likely be willing to take that chance.

White's essay reminds me of a some moments from Nicholson Baker's wonderfully contemplative little book A Box of Matches (2003), such as this passage, in which his similarities to White are fully on display:

[L]ast month we had that very unusual snowfall that ticked against the window all night. It was an unusual snow, almost like Styrofoam in its consistency in some of the deep places, and when you dug in it, the light that it let through was an interesting sapphire blue--perhaps different prevailing temperatures during snowflake-growth result in a different shape of crystal, which absorbs and allows passage to different wavelengths of light. That Saturday Henry and I dug a tunnel through the snowplow pile. The duck became interested in our project--companionably she climbed to the top, beaking around in it for bits of frozen mud. When both of her feet got cold at the same time she sat down in the snow for a while to warm them. Once or twice she levitated, flapping hard. She didn't much want to walk through the tunnel, and we didn't make her.

Baker also reminds me of Thoreau in that passage, his ever-attentive eye trained on minute details of the snow, as his mind ticks away in the background trying to understand their whys and wherefores.



Thoreau himself, not unexpectedly, is good on snow: his Journals offer entry after wintry entry filled with descriptions of and inquiries about snowfall. In honor of today's Chicago, where last night's thundersnow has drifted in places higher than a man's head, I'll choose the entry of January 13, 1852:

Would not snow-drifts be a good study,--their philosophy and poetry? Are they not worthy of a chapter? Are they always built up, or not rather carved out of the heaps of snow by the wind passing through the chinks in the walls? I do not see yet but that they are builded. They are a sort of ripple-marks which the atmospheric sea makes on the snow-covered bottom.

Snow has fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow, but from our cozy home here beneath the atmospheric sea the midwinter is far from bleak. Books and cats and tea, and snow as far as the eye can see--how can we complain?

Peace, but not the world's peace, or, Rumer Godden's In This House of Brede

{Photo by rocketlass.}

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about opening lines to novels, and I cited a couple of books that I think would have been better had their too-writerly opening lines been turned into epigraphs, or even cut entirely.

Had I read Rumer Godden's In This House of Brede (1969) when I wrote that post, I would have quoted its opening paragraph as one that strikes the perfect balance, obviously standing apart from the rest of the novel while just as clearly establishing its tone:

The motto was "Pax," but the word was set in a circle of thorns. Pax: peace, but what a strange peace, made of unremitting toil and effort, seldom with a seen result; subject to constant interruptions, unexpected demands, short sleep at nights, little comfort, sometimes scant food; beset with disappointments and usually misunderstood; yet peace all the same, undying, filled with joy and gratitude and love. "It is my own peace I give unto you." Not, notice, the world's peace.

It's enough to make you feel, instantly, that you're in the hands of a master. The balanced sentences feel so precise, so careful in their description, while the strong, authoritative, voice, markedly honest, is working toward the crescendo of that perfectly rendered closing line.

I knew from the moment I read that paragraph that I would love this novel--but I wouldn't ever have gotten that far were it not for Terry Teachout's praise for the book on his blog*. And I'm so grateful: In This House of Brede is a truly marvelous novel, one that, while focusing on a group of enclosed nuns in an English abbey at midcentury, manages to do what the best and most capacious novels do: make you feel like you're learning great truths about how people live.

The novel's protagonist is Philippa Talbot, a 42-year-old widow who, after making an unusually successful career for herself as a civil servant (unusually successful, that is, for a woman in her era), decides to throw it all up in order to enter the enclosed abbey of Brede. Her journey, from worldly career woman to contemplative, prayer-driven nun, forms the backbone of the book, but really her story is just a way into telling the story of the entire abbey. In the course of the novel, Godden introduces a couple of dozen nuns, some of which we come to know intimately, others more glancingly, but all of which are, by the end of the novel, distinct.

In her brief introduction to the Loyola Classics edition, Phyllis Tickle describes the convent of Brede:

Brede is a holy place inhabited by very human sinners called to a very particular form of service to God. The cloistered nuns have one single, overarching vocation. They are called to the life of prayer. Everything else is subsumed under that one duty: prayer. In choir and away from it, the nuns pray. They know that it is in this way only that the human world is changed.

In the novel, we encounter nuns and monks in service orders as well, who go out into the world doing works--they are the Marthas to the Brede sisters' Marys--and what is perhaps most striking about the novel is that Godden makes the calling of prayer understandable and sympathetic, even in that context, even to a lifelong nonbeliever like me. The nuns may or may not, depending on your belief, be effecting change in the world through their prayer, but there's no question that the atmosphere they create within Brede is different from the outside, different for its silences and its seclusion and its neverending wheel-of-the-years calendar and its relentless focus on contemplation, a place that changes those within. Watching a lark in the garden, Philippa reflects, "I never had time to watch larks before. Odd, one has to leave the world to discover it."

Godden was a recent convert to Catholicism when she wrote the novel, but it's not a novel that assumes or demands belief. As Tickle writes in her introduction, "Godden was a consummate artist long before she became a Christian, and she never betrays her craft, not even to make a doctrinal point." Instead, what we see are real people, with real flaws, trying each day to simply be better. Some succeed; some fail. Sometimes those are the same person. Of a particularly troublesome older nun who has just erupted in selfish anger, the Prioress says to the Abbess, "You know how sorry she will be," to which the Abbess replies, "Yes, I know. It gets a little wearying." And others are weary of the Abbess; that is how life, and human interaction, inherently imperfect, is.

Ultimately, for me, In This House of Brede ended up falling into one of my favorite categories: it's a novel about work, and about the ways that the structure and proximity and demands of work help and hinder us in forming real relationships with our coworkers. Godden's nuns are a mixed bag (old, young, progressive, conservative, down-to-earth, ethereal) but they're all stuck together, for life, in this place, and each in her own way must make the best of it--while also, if she is to be true to her calling, trying to help her fellow nuns make the best of things for themselves, as well. The abbey is contemplative, but it still must be made to function from day to day, and the work that requires--and the agonizing decisions required of its leader, the Abbess--is wonderfully drawn.

The debate among the nuns over Vatican II, which Godden--in her unusual, but effective narrative style of peppering scenes with dialogue from earlier or later discussions, as if overheard or remembered, as if the abbey is one large whispering gallery--stretches out over three or four pages, is a good example of the complexity of the convent's internal life. Conservative nuns fear that all they love is being stripped away; the more progressive nuns believe that more must be done. No consensus is reached, but, without taking a side, Godden notes--and we believe her, because now we know these nuns:

Pope John had announced, "We are going to shake off the dust that has collected on the throne of St. Peter since the time of Constantine and let in fresh air," and the chill of fresh air, blowing in a closed atmosphere, is always painful; new ideas, new thoughts, new changes were blowing through the monastery, not a fresh breeze as perhaps Pope John had intended, but in gusts, damaging storms.

Or take this account, particularly chilling to book lovers, of the enforcement of the order's vow of poverty:

On Ash Wednesday afternoon each nun had to give in her poverty bill, an exact amount of everything she had in her cell, and, if she had one, in her workroom. "We don't want to collect things," Dame Clare explained to her novitiate [class of incoming nuns]. No nun, from the least to the most important, escaped. Abbess Catherine was gentle, if inexorable--"and very thorough," said Dame Veronica feelingly. "Do youreally need all those books? Choose three." "One watch is all you can use," or, "Dear child, you seem to have enough pens for an army." "Everyone should have the same," was the hothead cry of some. "If you pause to think, you could not say that," said Mother Prioress in mildness. "Dame Agnes, for instance, may need twenty books. Dame Perpetua needs one, as she would tell you herself, or perhaps none."

These are the negotiations, the very human, emotional interactions, of a life dedicated to a rule.**

In a way, the world conjured up by In This House of Brede feels like the flip side of J. F. Powers's brilliant work: his priests are human, his church mostly secular--though affording the occasional moment of grace; Godden's nuns are also fully human, but even when they are petty and small, the reality of their community, and its power, when carefully managed, to create a different, more contemplative world within the world, shines through. And the novel, like few others--J. L. Carr's A Month in the Country comes to mind, as does Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It--manages to grace the reader with that world, however temporarily. You come out of this novel with your breathing slowed, your perceptions heightened, your patience with and attendance on the things of this world augmented.

It's a stunning novel, therefore, perfect for these wintry days when the promise of spring seems so unlikely, so far away.

PS Don't be scared off by the 600-plus pages of the pleasantly chunky, small-trim Loyola Classics edition; in the normal-trim library edition I read initially, the book only runs about 350 pages.

Casanova requests the pleasure of our company for one more night . . .

Casanova's History of My Life runs to 3,700 pages in manuscript, so it doesn't seem like overkill to spend one more day on it, and on his life. And by chance, this week when I've fallen once again for Casanova's charms is the same week that Ian Kelly's acclaimed biography Casanova: Actor, Love, Priest, Spy (2009) is being published in paperback. I'm now about 100 pages in--Casanova's twenty-four years old and just coming into his own as a seducer and a roue--and it's already clear that Kelly's created a fine companion to the memoirs, corroborating a surprising number of Casanova's stories and giving useful context about the state of travel, sexual mores, Venice, and more. There's of course no substitute for Casanova's book itself--including, I'd argue, the abridged edition--but if you're not sure yet whether you want to set out on the long road with the Chevalier de Seingalt, making his acquaintance through Kelly's book would be a good test.

Some notes, then, to close out the week:

1 On Wednesday I drew the inevitable comparisons between Casanova and Don Juan, and if I'd had Kelly's book to hand, I could have shared this scene from the first page:

Casanova had preferred Don Giovanni [to Mozart's newest work, La Clemenza di Tito]. He had collaborated on the libretto and attended the premiere in the same theatre. "Seen it?" he was said to have responded to his old friend the Venetian librettist da Ponte. "I've practically lived it."

From there, it's only fair to turn to Da Ponte's own memoirs, in which he records some advice the sixty-seven-year-old Casanova gave him in 1792. Casanova, who already owed Da Ponte money, added a couple of sequins to his debt, saying,

[S]ince I can never return either these, or the others for which I am in your debt, I will give you three pieces of advice which will be worth much more than all the treasures of this world: first, my dear Da Ponte, if you would make your fortune, do not go to Paris--go to London; second, when you get to London, never set foot inside the Caffe degl' Italiani; and third, never sign your name!

Laments Da Ponte:

Happy me, had I religiously followed his advice! Almost all the ills and losses I suffered in that city . . . came from my having frequented the Caffe degl' Italiani, and from having signed my name imprudently and without understanding the consequences.

Also interesting t is the fact that, despite Casanova's age, Da Ponte's wife "had been dazed by the vivacity, the eloquence, the inexhaustible vein, and all the many ways, of that extraordinary old man." She asked for his story, and Da Ponte "entertained her pleasantly for many hours recounting to her what I knew of it." Casanova surely would have been pleased to learn that he'd made such an impression.

2 In May of 1744, the nineteen-year-old Casanova stopped off in Orsara, where he'd been briefly a few months before:

He imagined he would not be recognized, dressed splendidly as a Venetian officer, but the local barber-surgeon remembered him with unexpected clarity and unusual cause: "You communicated a certain love token [gonorrhoea] to Don Geralamo's housekeeper," he recalled, "who gave it to a friend, who shared it with his wife. She gave it to a libertine who distributed it so effectively that in less than a month I had fifty patients whom I cured for a proper fee. . . . Can I hope," he continued, "that you will remain here for a few days and give the disease a fresh start?"

Which serves, to those of us who tend to think about economics, as a reminder that GDP is a crude measure, and that not every boost to GDP is a net gain for society. The scene also calls to mind the novels of John Irving. Surely I'm not the only male who, on reading as a teenager about character after character getting the clap in Irving's books, fearfully wondered if I was being given frightening insights into inevitable side effects of adult sexuality?

3 Kelly tells how, at not quite sixteen, and seeming, as a quick-witted young man of limited means and pedigree, destined for the church, Casanova delivered his first sermon, in Venice:

Casanova delivered the sermon to some acclaim, and a collection plate that profited him "nearly fifty zecchini . . . when I was greatly in need of money . . . together with some love letters all of which made me think seriously of becoming a preacher."

It was a different era, and the combination of the church's ubiquity and relative worldliness meant that the role and expectations of a clergyman then were very different from what we associate with them now, but even knowing that, it remains hard to imagine Casanova as a priest. Make that very hard.

4 Speaking of religion, while in Constantinople as a nineteen-year-old abate, Casanova explained to a Muslim friend and patron that Catholicism offered him an important advantage in his most cherished pursuit:

He even confessed that he could be a philanderer and a good Catholic by means of frequent confession and absolution: "I am a complete man and I am a Christian. I love the fair sex and I hope to enjoy many conquests . . . for when we confess our crimes to our priests they are obliged to absolve us."

I'm no Catholic, but I don't think that's quite how it's supposed to work.

And with that, let us quietly descend the drainpipe and steal away in silence from Casanova's rooms. Next week I'll be back with . . . nuns. Not, let's be clear, nuns like Casanova's beloved M. M., with whom he ______ and _______ and ______. No, these are upstanding, twentieth-century nuns, with very human problems but very holy ambitions--and nary a Casanova in sight.

Casanova and Don Juan

{Photo by rocketlass.}

In The Mirror of Ideas (1998), Michel Tournier contrasts Casanova and history's other great seducer, Don Juan. Of the latter Tournier writes,

It has been said that he did not like women, that he disdained them. He treats them like prey, and the list of his conquests read by the valet Leporello [in Tirso de Molina's The Seducer of Seville] is no more than a list of kills. Such is the eternity of Don Juan that he lives on among the young toughs of the suburbs whose favorite sport is "scoring with chicks."* But for Don Juan, sex is inseparable from religion. Woman is the great temptress, and the man who succumbs to her evil charms is damned.

Casanova, on the other hand, "a poor commoner, relies on his personal charm to seduce, and

Even though he is not handsome, women cannot resist him because they know from the beginning that he loves them with all his body and all his heart. . . . Wandering adventurer, gambler, cheater, incorrigibly unfaithful, he is nevertheless loved because he loves the whole woman, including her most intimate secrets.

For Casanova, the object of his desire is paramount. It is not, as with Don Juan, about notching another conquest; rather, it is about the fact that women are what interests him most of all the world's glittering beauties, and that, as Stefan Zweig notes in his brief study of Casanova, he loves to make them happy:

To Casanova, the first and last word of enjoyment, and all enjoyment that lies between, is to see women happy, amazed with delight, rapturous, laughing, carried out of themselves. As long as he has money left, he lavishes presents on the woman of his momentary choice, flatters her vanity with luxurious trifles, loves to deck her out splendidly, loves to wrap her in costly laces before he unclothes her that he may enjoy her nakedness, loves to surprise her with gifts more expensive than she has ever dreamed of, loves to overwhelm her with the tokens of his extravagant passion. He is like one of the gods of Hellas, a bounteous Zeus, that thereafter he speedily vanishes into the clouds. "I have always loved women madly, but I have always preferred freedom even to them." This increases his attraction, for the stormy phenomena of his appearance and disappearance enshrine him in their memory as something unwonted which has brought them rapturous delight, so that association with him is never staled by habit.

Every one of these women feel that Casanova would be impossible as a husband, as a faithful Celadon; but as a lover, as a god of a passing night, they will never forget him.

That is what makes Casanova so delightful, reading his memoirs so relatively guilt-free. Oh, when you get right down to it, no, of course Casanova can't be defended; no matter how convincing his portrait of himself as Don Juan's opposite, he surely left some damage in his wake.** But he is never caustic, never cruel, never inattentive; his whole existence is built on attention to the present moment (and the lady of it). The future is unknowable, the past negligible, the present all--and the verve implied by such a worldview is irresistible.

I sought out Tournier's thoughts on the pair of seducers because, by coincidence, the book I read last week right after Zweig's Casanova, Steven Millhauser's The King in the Tree (2003), features a novella about Don Juan. Millhauser's Don Juan, like so many of his characters, is weary, a bit confused, and beginning, against his wishes, to suspect that the very foundations of his life might be cheap constructs of paste and muslin:

In his brief life he had bedded more than two thousand women and killed fourteen men--five in duels, eight in self-defense, and one by mistake, through a curtain at which he was thrusting in sheer high spirits. He feared no man, mocked the machinery of heaven, and was heard to say that the devil was a puppet invented by a bishop to frighten children in the nursery. Men envied him, women of stainless virtue stood in the window to watch him ride by. And yet this man, who walked the earth like an immortal, who did whatever was pleasing to him and who satisfied his every desire, felt that a darkness had fallen across his spirit. . . . He was not bored. Don Juan didn't know whether he loved women,but he knew that he loved the pursuit and conquest of women, loved the feeling that he was following pleasure to the farthest edges of his nature. No, he felt restless in some other way, dissatisfied deep in his blood; and he began to feel that he was looking for something, though he didn't know what it was, exactly, or where he might find it.

Millhauser's Don Juan has, to put it crudely, lost his mojo, and that loss--the exploration of vaguely understood loss being Millhauser's metier--transforms him into, for the first time, a sympathetic character. The love triangle into which Millhauser leads Don Juan is wonderfully imagined and rendered, and the denouement (which perhaps shouldn't surprise either Don Juan or us, but does) is perfect.

So for these dark and wintry months, I prescribe some Casanova, leavened with Millhauser. The former will be like opening a window and breathing deep the air of spring; the latter will be like remembering a spring from your youth, when you did . . . something . . . something . . . something marvelous.

Seduced yet again by Casanova

Having cut my teeth in independent retail, I'm about as loyal a customer of my local bookstore, 57th Street Books, as it's possible to be. But loyalty to a store can stand the occasional infidelity . . .and last week in New York I found myself, like a lonely businessman eyeing the lady with the Cosmopolitan and the Blackberry down the bar, casting my eyes over the wares at the lovely little Three Lives and Company.

The infidelity metaphor is appropriate here, for the book I bought--all tarted up by a face-out placement--was Pushkin Press's edition of Stefan Zweig's Casanova: A Study in Self-Portraiture. I've written before of my love of Casanova's memoirs, with their unapologetically hedonistic glimpse into eighteenth-century life, and Zweig nails their appeal:

Imaginative writers rarely have a biography, and men who have biographies are only in exceptional instances able to write them.

Casanova is a splendid, almost unique exception. In him at length we find a man afire with the love of pleasure, a man who plucks at the fleeting hour, grasps at the skirts of happy chance, and is endowed by fate with the most extraordinary adventures; a man with an amazingly good memory, and one whose character knows nothing of inhibitions. This man tells us the tremendous story of his life, tells it without any moral restraints, without poetical adornments, without philosophic embroidery; he gives us a plain, matter-of-fact account of his life as it actually was, passionate, hazardous, rascally, reckless, amusing, vulgar, unseemly, impudent, lascivious, but always tense and unexpected. He is moved to tell his story; not by literary ambition, not by boastfulness or penitence, or an exhibitionist urge toward confession; but by a straightforward desire to tell it. . . . Here the narrator is not a fabulist, an inventor, but the master of poesy of life itself, life whose world is richer than any world of fancy. All Casanova need do is satisfy the most modest of the demands made upon the artist; he must render the almost incredible, credible.

"A straightforward desire to tell it"--yes, that's it. That's the genius of Casanova's memoirs: in an autobiography that is, in a certain sense, the world's biggest brag, the reader never gets the sense that that's how Casanova sees it. Rather, he is infinitely curious, and he expects us to be as well; in fact, his whole bed-to-bed life could be boiled down to an insatiable curiosity. Zweig picks one example out of hundreds, which begins with Casanova rushing to Naples on important business:

At the inn where he has halted for a brief space, he catches sight of a woman in a neighbouring room, in a stranger's bed (that of a Hungarian captain). Nay, what makes the matter more absurd is that he does not yet know whether she was pretty or not, for she is hidden under the bedclothes. He has merely heard laughter, a young woman's laughter, and thereupon his nostrils quiver. He knows nothing about her, whether she is attractive or the reverse, likely to be compliant or not, whether she is a possible conquest at all. Nevertheless he casts aside all his other plans, sends his horses back to the stable, and remains in Parma, merely because this off-chance of a love adventure has turned his head.

Thus does Casanova act in the manner of his kind anywhere and everywhere. By day or by night, in the morning or the evening, he will commit any folly in the hope of spending an hour with an unknown woman.

This is what he lived, and he thinks it might interest us because it interested him. Little to nothing else matters: morality, respectability, religion--what are those next to chances seized, gambles won? He is a mountebank and a cad and a seducer, and he thinks we enjoy reading about his life because of that.

And he's right. If you love the eighteenth century, if you love raconteurs, if you love truly singular personalities, you owe it to yourself to read History of My Life.

Colonel Roosevelt

I'm hip-deep in Edmund Morris's Colonel Roosevelt (2010), the third and final volume in his biographical portrait of Theodore Roosevelt, which began all the way back in 1980 with The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. The first volume is absolutely stunning, with scene after scene that had me gasping aloud at Roosevelt's audacity, vivacity, and strangeness, while the second volume flagged a bit; the presidential years simply can't compare to Roosevelt's racketing about the Wild West and clawing for power back in Albany. But this volume--despite its being the third I've read on Roosevelt's post-presidential years (including Candice Millard's gripping tight-focus account of an Amazonian adventure, River of Doubt, and Patricia O'Toole's empathetic and detailed account of the period from 1909 on, When Trumpets Call)--has been a treat from the start.

It's full of scenes like this one, from a 1912 convention to nominate Republican delegates in Oklahoma:

The local committee chairman, Edward Perry, was a Roosevelt man who hoped to create a progressive stampede for the Colonel. A letter from Gifford Pinchot reminded him that, as yet, La Follette was Taft's only official challenger. Perry read the letter to the convention, but made plain that he still favored Roosevelt. This infuriated the rank and file supporting Taft. Pandemonium ensued, with Perry roaring "Slap Roosevelt in the face if you dare!" over contrary shrieks and howls. A posse of fake Rough Riders invaded the hall. For fifteen minutes they tried to storm the stage, but found it harder to take than the Heights of San Juan. Cigar-smoking Taft forces repelled them. One cavalryman got through on a miniature pony: the young son of Jack "Catch-'em-Alive" Abernathy, a friend of Roosevelt's famous for seizing wolves by the tongue. The boy shrilled "I want Teddy!" to the crowd, touching off further furor. But then the organization men suppressed him, and the convention endorsed Taft over La Follette by a vote of 118 to 32. Perry, locally known as "Dynamite Ed," showed his displeasure by going outside and detonating five hundred pounds of explosives.

The scene brings to mind the great moment in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence when a horseman mounts the stage at the nominating convention and proceeds to do lariat tricks, to the loud (and drunken) approbation of the assembled.

And there are countless other vividly described moments worth sharing. Like this one, in which the national nominating convention in Chicago proves that it can be just as rambunctious as Oklahoma's:

But then rhythmic cries of "Teddy, Teddy--we want Teddy!" developed in the uproar, like the drumbeat of a coming fanfare. Attention began to divert from Hadley on the floor to a pretty woman sitting in a high gallery. She wore a white dress, with a bunch of pinks at her waist. Whatever mysterious force focused fourteen thousand pairs of eyes on her, she was thespian enough to revel in it. She blew kisses at the crowd, then, leaning over the balustrade, unrolled a portrait of Theodore Roosevelt. The noise became deafening. Unfazed, she began to yell, and proved to have the lungs of a Valkyrie. "Boys--give three cheers for Teddy!"

A golden bear materialized beneath her, in the shape of the mascot of the California delegation. She reached out and cuddled it as it rose on the top of a proffered totem, whereupon the poles of other Roosevelt delegations joined in and jiggled up and down in phallic rivalry. The woman in white vanished for a minute. When she reappeared on the floor, it seemed improbable that the Coliseum could contain more sound. She marched up the main aisle, flushed with excitement, followed by stampeding delegates in an unconscious parody of Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People. . . . [S]he was hoisted giggling onto a shelf of shoulder and carried to the rostrum. Elihu Root tolerantly let her take control of the proceedings.

Then there's this moment, which makes my ears hurt just to read about--it would almost make a person wish for vuvuzelas:

One of the strangest [sounds in the hall], accompanied by whistles and screams of "Toot, toot!" was the spine-stiffening hiss of sheets of sandpaper scraped together. It was meant to express the conviction among Roosevelt Republicans that an organization "steamroller" was under way, intent on flattening their spirit of revolt.

But I find myself partial to this moment, when Roosevelt, newly arrived in Chicago to try to manhandle the convention, greets the crowd on Michigan Avenue from his hotel balcony:

Far to his left and right, a flotsam of faces swirled. The smoky, coppery sky seemed to press down on the city, concentrating its heat and noise. Waving his hat for quiet, he yelled in his high voice, "Chicago is a mighty poor place in which to try and steal anything."

Really? I'm disappointed to learn that our reputation hadn't already been properly established by 1912.

Gravitational anarchy

A recent podcast from WNYC's "Radiolab" featured actress Hope Davis reading long passages from an absolutely fascinating--and at times freaky--account of a long-undiagnosed illness that afflicted a Manhattan librarian in 1957. The account, which is told for the most part in the woman's own words, comes from a collection of midcentury New Yorker writer Berton Roueche's The Medical Detectives (1980). As I tend to do with podcasts, I listened to this on while running . . . late on a snowy evening along the deserted lakefront path, lit only by the chilly moon . . . and the effect was powerful, and even scary.

It starts simply:

I got up to join [my husband, Frank], and as I did--as I started across the room--I felt the floor sort of shake. It only lasted a moment--less than that, I suppose. Just an eyeblink. But the floor very definitely moved. "Good heavens!" I said. "What was that?" Frank just looked at me. His face was a perfect blank. It was obvious he didn't know what I was talking about.

It happened again. And again. And it got worse:

Sometimes it was though I were sinking into the floor. The room would tilt and I'd take a step, and the floor was like snow. It would give under my foot and I'd sink what felt like an inch, and other times it was the reverse--the floor would rise to meet me. . . . By then, it wasn't simply the floor that moved. When the floor tilted, the walls of the room tilted with it.

For the reader (or the listener), the instability culminates in an absolutely terrifying trip through an underground pedway that reads like a nightmare out of Bolano; for the poor woman who suffered through this, it eventually culminates in a diagnosis, and, fortunately, remission. But I'll leave that part a mystery for now. The essay is short, and the podcast, even shorter, is available at the "Radiolab" site. If what I've quoted creeps you out as much as it did me, you definitely should check out the rest.

Martin Luther King Jr.

Every year on this holiday, I feel I should recommend Taylor Branch's truly amazing three-volume biography-and-history, America in the King Years. I've written about it before, and those posts probably tell you all you need to hear from me about it. Suffice it to say that it's as dramatic and well-told as it is important, and I have trouble imagining attempting to understand American life and culture from the 1950s on without it.

Rest in peace, Dr. King.

The (non) ghost stories of Edith Wharton

As I was reading The New York Stories of Edith Wharton over the weekend, in anticipation of a trip to (a, um, somewhat different) New York, I encountered a couple of passages that made me pause and, figuratively, look around, wondering whether Vincent Price or Christopher Lee might be about to make an appearance.

This one, for example, from "Autres Temps," which finds a disgraced divorcee visiting her newly engaged daughter's country house of the first time. Try reading it with fogs and mystery on the brain, as a cousin tries to keep the mother in her room . . . at all costs!:

"Yes; it's too bad." Miss Suffern's gaze grew vague. "You do look tired, you know," she continued, seating herself at the tea-table and preparing to dispense its delicacies. "You must go straight back to your sofa and let me wait on you. The excitement has told on your more than you think, and you mustn't fight against it any longer. Just stay quietly up here and let yourself go. You'll have Leila to yourself on Monday."

Mrs. Lidcote received the tea-cup which her cousin proffered, but showed no other disposition to obey her injunctions. For a moment she stirred her tea in silence; then she asked: "Is it your idea that I should stay quietly up here until Monday?"

Miss Suffern set down her cup with a gesture so sudden that it endangered an adjacent plate of scones. When she had assured herself of the safety of the scones she looked up with a fluttered laugh. "Perhaps, dear, by to-morrow you'll be feeling differently. The air here, you know--"

"--What was that?!"

"What was what, dear?"

Okay, so I added that last exchange. But it didn't seem out of place, did it?

For these purposes, the next story, "The Long Run," is even better. Here's the key passage, introducing an old friend of the narrator; try not to imagine a rediscovered acquaintance in an M. R. James story as you read this description:

I was glad to see them all . . . but I was most of all glad--as I rather wonderingly found--to set eyes again on Halston Merrick.

He and I had been at Harvard together, for one thing, and had shared there curiosities and ardors a little outside the current tendencies: had, on the whole, been more critical than our comrades and less amenable to the accepted.

The two fell out of touch for an interval, during which Merrick inherited an iron works and was forced to retreat from society:

During that long interval I heard of no new phase in Merrick's evolution, but this did not surprise me, as I had never expected from him actions resonant enough to cross the globe. All I knew--and this did surprise me--was that he had not married, and that he was still in the iron business. All through those years, however, I never ceased to wish, in certain situations and at certain turns of thought, that Merrick were in reach, that I could tell this or that to Merrick. I had never, in the interval, found any one with just his quickness of perception and just his sureness of response.

All that's needed now is an unexpected awkwardness of manner (and perhaps a pallor) on Merrick's part, an invitation to his remote house, and the revelation of some quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore that he's been diligently studying lo these twelve years.

Alas, the only ghosts in these two stories are those spirits of past mistakes and misfortunes that populate so many of her stories. Fortunately for ghost story fans, however, one of the later stories in the collection does end up turning on a ghost, which, were it October rather than snowy January, I just might have decided to interpret as Edith Wharton gently tweaking me . . . . from beyond the grave!

Openings

Elif Batuman wrote an entertaining blog post over the weekend about Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele inadvertently mixing up his Tolstoy and his Dickens: after citing War and Peace as his favorite book, apparently he started in on, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." Batuman points out, sympathetically, that War and Peace doesn't really open memorably; its first words are in French, for one thing, and they're dialogue, for another. Rather than announce that The Book is Beginning, Tolstoy merely draws back the curtain and invites the reader inside.

That got me thinking about opening lines. Unlike War and Peace, Anna Karenina does open memorably, with the famous aphorism:

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Unforgettable, certainly . . . but tell me, does it ring true to you? It's so familiar that I've always taken it as a commonplace, but the more I actually attend to it, the more I doubt. It strikes me as more a flourish than a thought, an overly writerly phrase rather than a genuine observation about human character. It's the sort of phrase that a writer lays down in the fervid inspiration that accompanies the beginning of work on a novel . . . and then should be sure to go back and cut.

It simply doesn't fit, either with what immediately follows or with the long rest of the novel. If Tolstoy hadn't already had such a strong epigraph--"Vengeance is mine. I shall repay."--he would have been better off relegating his opening to that status and beginning the book with the second paragraph instead:

All was confusion in the Oblonskys' house. The wife had found out that the husband was having an affair with their former French governess, and had announced to the husband that she could not live in the same house with him. This situation had continued for three days now, and was painfully felt by the couple themselves, as well as by all the members of the family and household.

Wouldn't it be better to be plunged directly into that irony and bustle, rather than being given Tolstoy's solemn pronouncement first? Isn't that paragraph far more true to the feeling of Tolstoy's world, in all its particularity?

Not that Tolstoy's alone in falling for his own beauties. Take L. P. Hartley, whose similarly well-known lines that open The Go-Between I adapted for the title to Monday's post:

The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.

Those lines work better than Tolstoy's with what's to come: in the immediate moment, the discovery by an adult of a journal he kept as a boy; in the course of the novel, his realization that his youthful self was missing, or misunderstanding, key elements of a drama in which he had played an unwitting part. But even so, those lines stand out as too chiseled, too separate; they'd do much better as an epigraph--that's the proper place for such an overarching, guiding observation.

And what about Dickens, and his (apparently Tolstoyan, per Michael Steele) "best of times, worst of times"? Those lines, bombastic as they may be, at least are tied to the book's theme of duality (overplayed though it may be in this weakest of Dickens novels)--and, because the passage is rarely quoted in full, it's easy to forget that Dickens intentionally deflates the tone by the end, a reminder that his true genius lay in his eye for the comic and self-important:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way--in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

Steele, it's only fair to say, is far from the first politician to fail to read far enough into a quotation to reach the sting in its tail. Methinks Dickens would have put him solidly into that category of "noisiest authorities."

For my money, however, Dickens's best opening lines come from the book of his that has been most effaced, as a piece of writing, by its many adaptations--A Christmas Carol:

Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge's name was good upon 'Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

Is there a better way to open a story that's to begin with the visit of a ghost?

In fact, as far as setting a tone and giving the reader a sense of what's to come, I can only think of one line that beats it:

When the phone rang, Parker was in the garage, killing a man.

That's from Richard Stark's Firebreak. What more do you need to know, other than how much time you've got left for reading before you have to drag yourself away to bed?

The past is a foreign country. They had far, far less to do there.

When I hear people lamenting the proliferation of entertainments--TV, video games, text messages, the Internet, etc.--that abound in our relentlessly modern world, distracting us from ye olde contemplative life, I often find myself shaking my head. Really? Would you really want to go back to the days when, outside big cities, almost all your entertainment options involved hitting someone with a stick? (See, for example, the two games--jingling and backswording--described in these posts about Tom Brown's Schooldays.)

I know that I'm oversimplifying the case nearly as much as the knee-jerk nostalgists are, but my reading over the weekend added a couple more entertaining arrows to my quiver. First, from Frans G. Bengtsson's The Long Ships (1954), I learned--to no surprise--that when it comes to brutal games, Tom Brown's classmates had nothing on the Vikings. When the warriors engage in a celebratory session of tests of strength, such as "finger-tug, wrestling, and flat-buttock lifting," as well as "the difficult sport known as knot-lifting," a translator's note explains that the last of these is:

A sort of invitation to break one's neck, played by strong, drunken men after a feast. One (the weaker) sits on the ground, while the other (the stronger) kneels on his hands and knees. The latter is the man who risks his neck. The weaker man sits with his knees drawn up and wide apart, puts his arms outside his thighs and locks his hands under his knees. The strong man then puts his head forward between the other man's knees and into his locked hands, and tries to rise to a standing position, while the victim does his worst by pressing his knees and his locked hands round the strong man's neck. It was (says the author, in a letter to the translator) "a frightful game, only played by drunken men."

Fun stuff!

At least the Vikings had the excuse of being drunk. The participants in the other game I came across this weekend didn't even have that. Here's a note to the Oxford World's Classics edition of George and Weedon Grossmith's Diary of a Nobody explaining a parlor game, "Cutlets":

Patrick Beaver, in Victorian Party Games, describes this as a variant of "Quakers' Meeting," which he explains thus: "The company arrange themselves on the floor in a straight line, all kneeling on the right knee while on the other nee they rest their hands and twiddle their thumbs. It is forbidden to smile--any player detected doing so having to pay a forfeit. The following conversation is then carried on, each line of which must be repeated in turn by every player before the next line is said.

Well friend, and how art thou?

Hast thou heard of Brother Obadiah's death?

No, how did he die?

With one finger up (As each player repeats this line he stops twisting his thumbs and holds up his right forefinger),

With one eye shut (Each closes his right eye),

And shoulder all awry (Each does this).

How did he die?

In this way.

At this point the player at the top of the row give his neighbour a mighty shove and the whole company goes over like a pack of cards."

Oh, those wacky Victorians!

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go . . . do any of a vast number of activities that are right at my fingertips--and that don't involve shoving, breaking necks, or hitting with sticks.

Tips to file away for next year's holiday parties

{Photo by rocketlass.}

I wish I had read Frans G. Bengtsson's odd and endlessly entertaining novel The Long Ships (1954) before the holidays. I'm fortunate enough to be part of a more or less strife-free family, but for those of you who aren't, I think I could have drawn on Bengtsson's account of tenth-century Viking adventures to offer some familiar scenes, or even some guidance, as you embarked on the holiday gauntlet.

You may, for example, recognize a particularly acute example of the resentful guest:

Great men from all over the north came to Jellinge to celebrate Yule with King Harald. . . . The principal guest was King Harald's son, King Sven Forkbread, who had arrived from Hedeby with a large following. Like all King Harald's sons, he was the child of one of his father's concubines; and there was little love lost between him and his father, so that in general they avoided each other as much as possible. Every Yule, though, King Sven made the journey to Jellinge, and everybody knew why. For it often happened at Yule, when the food was richer and the drink stronger than at any other time in the year, that old men suddenly died, either in bed or on the drinking-bench. This had been the case with old King Gorm, who had lain unconscious for two days after a surfeit of Yuletide pork and had then died; and King Sven wanted to be near the royal coffers when his father passed over. For many Yules now he had made the journey in vain, and each year his impatience increased.

And, as those from disputatious families can surely attest, when you've got guests who insist on taking a heaping helping of insult as a part of their entree, it's best to have explicit ground rules:

When everyone was in his place, the groom of the bedchamber announced in a gigantic voice that the peace of Christ and of King Harald reigned in the hall, and that no edged implements might be used except for the purpose of cutting up food; any cut, thrust, or open wound caused by weapon, ale-tankard, meat-bone, wooden platter, ladle, or clenched fist would be reckoned as plain murder, and would be regarded as sacrilege against Christ and as an unpardonable crime, and the miscreant would have a stone tied round his neck and be drowned in deep water.

However, ven the best planning, and the most selfless forbearance, cannot always avail you:

In the evening a man from Halland told them about a great wedding that he had been present at in Finnveden, among the wild people of Smaland. During the celebrations a dispute had broken out concerning a horse deal, and knives had quickly appeared; whereupon the bride and her attendant maidens had encouraged the disputants to settle the matter there and then. However, when the bride, who belonged to a well-known local family, saw her uncle's eye gouged out by one of the bridegroom's kinsmen, she had seized a torch from the wall and hit her bridegroom over the head with it, so that his hair caught fire. One of the bridesmaids, with great presence of mind, had forced her petticoat over his head and twisted it tight, thereby saving his life, though he screamed fearfully and his head, when it appeared again, was burned black and raw. Meanwhile the first had caught the straw on the floor, and eleven drunken or wounded men lying in it had been burned to death; so that this wedding was generally agreed to have been one of the best they had had for years in Finnveden, and one that would be long remembered.

In other words, the one true lesson of The Long Ships? Don't invite Vikings to your holiday parties.

Sinatra and "Lush Life"

One of the questions that I had hoped James Kaplan's new biography of Frank Sinatra would answer was why Sinatra never recorded Billy Strayhorn's beautiful song of world-weary cafe society, "Lush Life," one of my favorite American standards. I'd seen a passing reference in another Sinatra book--Friedwald's, perhaps?--to one early 1950s attempt, aborted when an Ava emergency arose, but I hadn't ever happened across another mention or explanation..

Kaplan doesn't have anything to say about the song except for a quick aside in the acknowledgments. After explaining that the book's origins lie in an evening of dinner and drinks with a bunch of musicians who had worked with Sinatra, he writes that the anecdotes retailed at that table included one from Vinnie Falcone,

who was Sinatra's conductor and accompanist toward the end of the singer's career[. Falcone] spoke of his fruitless efforts to get Frank to record the great and legendarily difficult Billy Strayhorn classic "Lush Life." "Come on, Boss, just you and me and a piano," Vinnie said. Sinatra shook his head. Even the gods know their limits.

Oh, but think how much even a weak try at that one, with its languid introductory verse and slowly cascading climax, would have enlivened Sinatra's late output! To hear that worn voice intone those enervated lines . . . . Gods may know their limits, but that needn't stop us mortals from wanting to see them tested.

Kaplan's anecdote doesn't clear up the question of the earlier attempts at "Lush Life," however--but fortunately, a coworker came to my rescue, lending me Charles L. Granata's beautifully illustrated, fascinating Sessions with Sinatra: Frank Sinatra and the Art of Recording (1999). Granata worked on the reissues of many of Sinatra's albums, and his book combines accounts from session principals with information gleaned from the unedited tapes of session after session, from the blown takes to spoken instructions to the banter among Sinatra, his arrangers, and the musicians. Granata notes in his introduction,

To sit in a modern studio and eavesdrop, fifty years after these moments occurred, is a delightfully eerie experience. In some cases, the conversations are so absorbing and the fidelity so true that you feel as though you are sitting among the musicians in the orchestra.

It's a book to sit with before and after you listen to Sinatra's greatest albums; it's hard to imagine any Frank fan who wouldn't come away richer for the experience. To take just one example: in recording "Nice and Easy," Sinatra at first had trouble with the little rhythmic jog that closes the song, "Nice and easy does it / [beat] every time." "Ah, ya dirty mother! That quarter rest is murder!" he exclaimed. And of more import: Granata discovered that the song's signature pre-coda homage to Basie, "Like the man said, One more time," turns out to be Sinatra's own idea. Along the way, he also experimented with closing tags, including "Just put your hand on it baby, that's all," "Slowly, baby," and "Isn't that better, baby?", all of which seem more suited to Jim Backus's "Delicious" than to the slow seduction of "Nice and Easy."

To return to "Lush Life": Granata confirms that it was planned as the eighth song at a May 29, 1958 session for Only the Lonely, but was scrapped, "possibly owing to the fatigue of such a long session." But Granata also makes the strong point that the intricate, out-of-meter piano introduction wouldn't have meshed well with the elegant, late-night simplicity of Bill Miller's playing on the album's standout track, "One for My Baby." Add in the complexity of the vocal line--Granata quotes Nelson Riddle saying, "It's a rather complicated song, and I think Frank would have been momentarily put off by all the changes that had to go on."--and it seems like it was just too much for the tired singer. A few failed takes and the song was tabled:

"Put it aside for a minute," someone (possibly [Leonard] Slatkin says, and Sinatra sarcastically retorts, "Put it aside for about a year!"

And thus, through, it seems, no fault of Ava after all, ended Sinatra's attempts at "Lush Life."

Mine, however, are ongoing. I've been practicing it in the shower for years, and one of my few (always modest) goals in life is to get to where I can play it on the piano and sing along without making friends and spouse too obviously want to leave the room. I'm young yet . . . and despite my love of the song's alcohol-soaked ennui, far from weary enough to give up.



{Photos by rocketlass.}

Singing in the rain

I've really had my legs knocked out from under me by a flu today, and I find my brain's not really up to a proper post, so I'll just share a passage from James Kaplan's new biography of Frank Sinatra. This scene comes in 1952, when Frank was near rock bottom: he'd been dropped by his agent, dropped by his studio, and was damn near to being dropped by his record label. Worse, the public seemed to have turned away, to other singers and other styles. Oh, and his running battle of a marriage to Ava Gardner was at its fiercest pitch.

Desperate, Frank booked a gig on Kauai . . .

playing a county fair in a tent. A leaky tent.

He pulled aside a flap and peered out at the audience. It was just a couple hundred red-faced tourists and hicks in aloha shirts and jeans and muumuus. Jesus Christ. The rain was drumming on the canvas, dripping on the ground. There was no orchestra, just an upright piano on a wooden platform. He closed the flap and looked at Bill Miller sitting on a folding chair, lean as a spider and pale as death--in Hawaii!--and sipping a cup of tea. Miller raised his eyebrows. Sinatra shook his head. Soon he'd be playing revival meetings.

Miller's thin lips formed into something like a smile.

Suddenly two brown-skinned girls in grass skirts came in, carrying flowered garlands, beaming. They dropped the leis over Frank's head, one by one, giggling, covering his cheeks with little kisses, and even as he grinned, his eyes grew moist

Frank turned to Miller. Should they do it?

Miller nodded and rose. Frank pulled the canvas aside and walked out onto the little stage, the garlands around his neck. The small crowd went nuts the second they saw him, clapping over their heads, whistling, stamping the ground. For a minute you couldn't even hear the rain on the tent. Sinatra was still smiling, the first time he'd been happy in weeks. He sat on the edge of the stage, dangling his legs, and said, "What do you want to hear?"

Kaplan's book--which only goes up to 1954, a fact that Doubleday's marketing crew ably buries in a line of copy--is completely absorbing, in part because I don't know Sinatra's life the way I know his music. My reading about Frank in the past has been almost entirely limited to books that turn to the facts of his life only in order to explain his music. (And of those, you still can't do better than Will Friedwald's Sinatra! The Song Is You.) And while there's a certain "you are there!", overly novelistic quality to Kaplan's writing that at times I find frustrating, at other times, as in the scene above, his technique works perfectly. In that scene, he takes an utterly unimportant, throwaway concert date and makes us feel what it must have been like--and makes us wish, rain and muumuus and all, that we had been there.